TREATMENT NOTE
Niladri Mukherjee
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Direction and Screenplay Writing
N I N E
Thriller/Duration:14:18/Format-HD/Color/Language-Hindi
SYNOPSIS
Nikhil spends the night at Hotel Mohini. Settling down in room no. nine, his night explores the strange happenings of the room and the mystery of its missing keys.
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GALLERY
TREATMENT NOTE
The treatment of the film is inspired from documentary craft of filmmaking where the camera, hand-held, observes and follows the character. Taking inspiration from Asghar Farhadi and Wong Kar Wai, the style was decided to be a little rough. This approach is different from what we always see in horror films where the camera, for most of the part, is on a tripod and the cinematic movements of dolly/Jib creates the tension. The lighting is kept saturated and starkly different in each location. The highly saturated colors are used to develop the characteristic of the hotel. Performances are kept very subtle. Sound design is used for adding elements of horror and background score to heighten emotions.
IMAGE REFERENCES
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Scratch film for Nine made according to the early drafts of the screenplay by piecing together shots from various films.
STORYBOARD
DRAWINGS BY RAHUL KASHYAP
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The DoP and myself sat with the storyboard artist to pre-visualize the film.
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MUSIC MAKING FOR REFERENCE
During Pre-Production I resort to make small music tracks as they help to reference and visualize scenes. Following tracks were developed in Fl Studio.
PROCESS OF DIRECTING ACTORS
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Actors were explained the scene but were never shown how to act it out.
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Sometimes they were asked to think of a situation which is totally different from the scene as that resulted in an interesting body gesture.
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Deliberately all actors were not introduced to each other till the first take was rolled. This was done to see if the unfamiliarity worked for the dialogue sequences on screen.
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But movement of actors in the space was strictly followed as it was designed on storyboard.
CAST AND CREW
Daniyal Khan as Nikhil Agarwal
Anup Mukherjee as receptionist
Atharva Barve as Chotu
Shashwat as man
Moomal as lady
Muskan Bhateja as an extra
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Directed by: Niladri Mukherjee
Screenplay by: Maanvi Chowdhary
Production design by: Nidhi Binu
Cinematography By: Bornil Anurag
Editing by: Nisha Satpute
Location sound and sound design by : Arjun Gonsalves
1st AD and production management: Maanvi Chowdhary
Gaffer/1st Camera assistant: Jai Wadker
2nd Camera assistant: Shambhavi R.
Light assistant: Urmimala Bandopadhyay and Srujana
Production assistant: Muskaan Bhateja, Nisha Satpute and Shambhavi R.
Art assistant: Vanshika and Anushree Rathi
Project mentor: Kiranmayi Indrganti
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Produced as a pre-thesis project at Srishti Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bangalore (2019)
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